Shoe Gazing

Special Effects Pedals

My son bought a new guitar and amp, and then he went out and scrounged a bunch of used special effects pedals. You plug the cable from the guitar into the pedal, and then you run another cable from the pedal to the amp. This puts the pedal in-line between the guitar and the amp, and when you tap the foot switch it activates the special effect. You can connect several of them in series and turn on as many as you want. Evidently this is a fairly common practice and bands that use lots of these pedals are known as shoe gazers because, duh, they are looking at these foot pedals while they play and it looks like they are gazing at their shoes.

What I didn't realize is how much of a band's sound depends on these special effects. John has been playing some bits of tunes using these special effects pedals and he is producing sounds I recognize much more readily than I would if it was just the tune without the effects.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.